David Carlier's blog

Sunday, 27 August 2017

FreeBSD visiting Dublin

Hi folks,

We are approaching the end of autumn but unlikely feeling sad, indeed there is many events ongoing from september ;-) EuroBSDCon and probably few local events as well.

Apart of this, same as usual, some of my commits for various projects first some (indirectly) work related like the Cassandra driver where I brought a little bit of BSD "spirit" ... The incoming PHP 7.2 version where I just updated a component I updated already a while ago. Apart of this, Doomsday engine accepted my little fixes and a handful doom client engines :-) Few other things are still ongoing but that s pretty much all at the moment...

Last thing ... Benedict Reuschling the famous FreeBSD Foundation Vice-President and one of the BSDNow talkers visited us, the Dublin BSD Group, in Dublin sharing his great and long experience of FreeBSD growing popularity, his great documentation knowledge and lot of great anecdotes and showing his love to teach to other people.

Hopefully, we ll see each other again in the next EuroBSDCon with some other BSD folks ;-)

Tuesday, 15 August 2017

tinynginx

Hi folks,

It is already mid august, thus we are moving towards the last moments of the "very" sunny Ireland's summer :-). Professionally speaking, I was mentioning on my Linkedin profile I was tweaking nginx source code (very surprised by the number of views by the way), specifically the memory pools part. This subset, I call friendly tinynginx. Of course, there is lot of people before me doing that for more or less similar purposes. In my case, basically I wrote few memory checkers with or without instrumentation (pointer tracking etc), memory calls run-time replacement which use it. Now, since I use it under FreeBSD I replace within nginx pool source the standard calls by FreeBSD specific non standard ones, also adding proper valgrind macro "check points" as I can where I saw fit. And as I mentioned in this same post, mainly DeviceAtlas C++ api seems to benefit a little performance increase as long the pool is properly set.

As a quick test, I tried to see if I could transpose this pool feature into kernel module as the code is not the convoluted spaghetti one and it seems it does it seems ;-)

Apart of this, hopefully some of my last contributions will be merged, will keep you posted as usual :-)

Friday, 11 August 2017

Barony TurningWheel

Hi folks,

Not too much news since the last time except that TurningWheel gladly accepted my changes for their game Barony a pretty good rogue-like's one; game sold in Steam, GOG ... at least. Changes to make it playable under BSD systems (not too much of effort to be honest, the game does not use too much system specific features). Kids seem to like it, I had much difficulty to convince my own daughter to let it go :-)

Thursday, 10 August 2017

EuroBSDCon Paris

Hi folks,

Not too much news technically speaking, more due to the fact than many people are in vacations tho. Otherwise, professionally speaking, I started to implement a very basic memory leak/use after free checker (usable at run time); quite challenging since I never did such things before and I need to make it multi-thread usable, finding best way to keep track of pointers and all the related headaches you necessarily go through when you implement this kind of library. Basically it implements also "memory junk" like jemalloc or OpenBSD malloc stats does. Well, probably not great and only for internal usage but it does the job pretty reliably at least :-)

Above all, I finally decided to attend my first EuroBSDCon which appears to happen in Paris. Before I was a bit reluctant but finally wanted to give it a try with the hope to meet people I admire and know only by email :-) Can be FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD no problems :-)